WATERLOO
The Research In Motion rocket had yet to blast off when a young Dave Kruis joined the small Waterloo company to work on its core product, the Inter@ctive Pager.
It was 1998, and few of us had any idea what text messaging was, let alone how nimble our thumbs would become, or how much longer – er, more productive - our workdays were about to get.
A year later, “they assigned me to this thing called BlackBerry,” Kruis said. And soon enough, the rocket ride had begun, with Kruis leading development of BlackBerry’s first internet service, PIN-to-PIN messaging (precursor to BlackBerry Messenger) and third-party applications, long before there were app stores.
It was a heady time as RIM grew from Waterloo upstart to global game-changer, transforming communication for millions of people. Gratifying as it was for Kruis, the intensity of the period took a toll.
“In 2005, I realized I was burning out and I just needed a break,” Kruis told 24 attendees at Communitech’s inaugural Entrepreneur Boot Camp on Sept. 9. “So I handed in my resignation and took some time off.”
And thus began Kruis’s own transformation from corporate employee to startup entrepreneur. In 2007 he founded Metranome, maker of software for delivering rich content to mobile devices. Kitchener-based Desire2Learn acquired Metranome in November 2010, and made Kruis its director of mobile strategy.
The story of his journey held particular resonance for attendees of the boot camp, about half of whom were former RIM employees. Communitech organized the event as part of a series to help former RIM workers displaced by a company streamlining program earlier in the summer, as well as others interested in starting their own companies.
Several in the audience at Waterloo’s Accelerator Centre said they could relate to the disorienting but liberating feeling Kruis experienced after his sudden plunge from an all-consuming job into the relative calm of family life at home. He spent the first six months reconnecting with friends and relatives, reading books unrelated to his work and checking off items on his long-neglected “honey-do” list of home improvement projects.
“I forced myself to detach,” he said. “I really took the six months to figure out who was I? What did I want to do?”
A couple of boot camp attendees have similarly reconnected with a whole other life outside of work, but admitted to some anxiety over the question, “What do you do after being so busy?”, and to some guilt for not bringing home a paycheque.
When Kruis suggested they read Candice Carpenter’s 2001 book, Chapters: Create a Life of Exhilaration and Accomplishment in the Face of Change, one woman said she was already doing just that.
After his six-month decompression, Kruis embarked on what he calls his “research and connection phase”, during which he compiled a list of “concepts, ideas, trends, anything that I’d noticed had sparked an interest for me.” Over time, he could look back at these jottings and see patterns in where his thoughts were going, which helped him in “matching trends with interests and skills.”
He looked into alternative energy, organic foods and other burgeoning areas, but also kept tabs on technology and was a frequent visitor to his alma mater, the University of Waterloo, where he had earned an environmental studies degree before obtaining an MBA in marketing, technology and business strategy at the University of Western Ontario.
“I spent a number of days walking around the UW campus, particularly in some of the engineering science buildings, talking to professors when I could and talking to students, trying to get a sense of what was going on at the technology level,” he said.
Kruis also attended conferences and networking events hosted by Communitech and others, where he gained insight into other industries, and held a stint as a mentor to university students.
Eventually, “I had to work,” he said, so he did some consulting and served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Tech Capital Partners in Waterloo, where he assessed prospective companies for investment, conducted market research and provided industry advice. All the while, he was surveying the horizon and researching the market in preparation to launch his own enterprise.
“At the end of that research phase, I had realized there were a couple of trends in technology that I wanted to focus on,” he said. “Smartphones were getting really smart, the type of content that was going to be delivered on these devices was getting richer,” and Kruis knew, from his RIM days, that mobile networks lacked the capacity to deal with it.
“And I said, ‘Look, there’s got to be a business around solving problems with that.’”
Realizing he couldn’t do it on his own, Kruis sought a co-founder, a long and careful process he equated with finding a marriage partner. “I did a lot of dating,” he said, “and I ended up finding a couple of awesome people” with whom he launched Metranome.
When one of them left six months later, Kruis learned a valuable lesson of entrepreneurship: “Just because you find a co-founder it doesn’t mean they’re going to stay with you, and part of that is making sure that all parties are really committed to it.”
Kruis also made sure his was a balanced partnership, in which responsibilities would be shared equitably and difficult issues dealt with frankly. For this reason, he said, “I’m not a super-big fan of hiring your friends, because I think your friends might not be as candid with you as strangers.”
Early hires are crucial, he said, because they influence the tone of a company going forward. “If you make a bad hire here, it can sink your ship pretty quick.”
New hires should also be screened for their familiarity and comfort with the chosen technological tools of the company, Kruis said.
Finally, “force your team to be lean and fast,” he said, “particularly in today’s environment. It was very different in 2007 in terms of the economy and fundraising. It’s a whole new world.”
Metranome managed to raise $500,000 in seed funding in early 2008, enough to build a team and develop a product. Its initial market was Hollywood, where movie studios were looking for a way to monetize content to be delivered on handheld devices.
When the economic crisis erupted in October 2008, prompting the collapse of some venture funds and retrenchment by others, “that was really brutal for us,” Kruis said, “but we did manage to pull off another round of funding; we had product and we had customers.” This second funding round of $1.5 million allowed Metranome to continue improving its platform and expand into new markets as the economy gradually stabilized.
With things going well nearly three years into its existence, the company’s investors began talking about an exit. Kruis said he hadn’t considered expanding into the education market when he heard that Desire2Learn (or D2L), a fast-growing e-learning software developer, was looking for a way into the mobile space.
An acquisition deal was reached, and “Metranome is now effectively the mobile division within D2L,” a company that serves about 500 educational institutions and six million students around the world.
Asked by a boot camp attendee to share any pros and cons of selling the company, Kruis said, “Now I’m in a big company again, which could be a pro or a con depending on how you look at it.” He is no longer a CEO directing a company, but he enjoys a lot of latitude within Desire2Learn; there was also a cultural and technical adjustment in integrating a small startup with a global company.
On the upside, “I now don’t have to worry about paycheques, and some of the problems I had as CEO I don’t have,” he said.
